Beauty in Thorns

by Kate Forsyth

  ‘Did you know Ruskin’s parents read all his mail?’ Gabriel said. ‘Can you imagine? My mother would die of shock if she read any of my letters to my friends.’

  Lizzie smiled, but her lips felt stiff. She looked out the window. She had never seen such large, grand houses. Her stomach knotted.

  The horse trotted through a set of iron gates, held open for them by a man who touched his hat, then brought the carriage around a sweeping drive to draw up in front of a tall Georgian mansion. The driver opened the carriage door, and Gabriel handed Lizzie down.

  By the time they had mounted the few wide steps to the portico, the front door had been opened by a footman in dark livery, who bowed them through to the drawing-room. Every inch of its walls were covered with paintings.

  ‘Turner,’ Gabriel whispered to her. ‘Ruskin loves him.’

  Lizzie did not answer. Her attention was focused on the three people waiting in the centre of the room. The two men were almost identically dressed in dark coats of sober cut, their sandy hair parted and neatly brushed to one side. The elder man had a white linen stock folded about his neck; the younger man’s neckcloth was of cornflower blue silk. They rose as Lizzie approached them, and inclined their heads in greeting. The woman remained seated. She was stout, and wore a black silk gown with a white cap over her severe iron-grey hair.

  ‘Good afternoon, Mr Rossetti,’ the older man said. He had a fierce pair of eyebrows, grey and sprouting. ‘Good to see you again. How are you getting on?’

  ‘Very well, thank you, sir,’ Gabriel answered. Lizzie had never heard him sound so subdued.

  Mr Ruskin turned his attention to Lizzie. ‘Miss Siddal, welcome. We have heard much about you. Please be seated.’ As Lizzie chose the hardest, most uncomfortable-looking chair, he introduced his wife and son. Lizzie smiled politely, and said all that was expected of her, even as she covertly examined the man who had paid so much for her drawings.

  John Ruskin was around thirty-six years of age, tall and thin and a little stooped, with a mouth marred by a small scar. He looked stiff and uncomfortable.

  Sympathy stirred within her. The previous summer, John and his wife, Effie, had caused the biggest scandal in years. She had left him, charging him with impotence. Their marriage had been legally annulled. It was rumoured that Effie and Johnny Millais were in love and intended to wed, which had shocked Gabriel terribly. He could not understand how Millais could be so ungrateful, when Ruskin had been such an important supporter of them all. The good news, though, Gabriel had said ebulliently, is that Ruskin and Millais were no longer on speaking terms, and so perhaps the rich art critic would be looking for someone new to patronise.

  John took her hand and bowed his head over it politely. He scrutinised her closely, still holding her hand. He seemed to like what he saw, for he drew up a chair and sat, uncomfortably close beside her, still staring at her.

  As Lizzie turned her attention to Mrs Ruskin, she was aware of John’s eyes on her face, then examining her slim form. It made her feel uncomfortable, but she kept her back straight, her voice well-modulated. She was pretending to be the kind of girl that usually visited rich ladies and gentlemen, with a maid to serve them tea in gilded teacups.

  ‘So, my son informs me that your father is a watchmaker,’ Mrs Ruskin said. ‘A fine profession for a man. They say that God is like a watchmaker, and the cosmos like a great machine created and wound up by Him to tick towards the Final Judgement.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ Lizzie replied faintly. Her father was not a watchmaker. He was just a humble ironmonger. She glanced at Gabriel, who gave her a sheepish grin. She flushed slightly and looked away. Gabriel was always embellishing and exaggerating, yet for him to do so about her family made her feel as if she was complicit in a lie. Yet she could not contradict him.

  ‘What do those watchmakers say, heh?’ Mr Ruskin interjected. ‘Perfect is near enough? A good philosophy for any of us.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Gabriel replied. ‘Well said.’

  ‘And I believe your family frowns upon you wishing to pursue art,’ Mr Ruskin went on. ‘That is a shame, indeed, a great shame.’

  ‘But perfectly understandable,’ Mrs Ruskin said in her ponderous way. ‘They must have wished for better things for you.’

  Lizzie bowed her head. She knew better than to try to defend herself.

  John came to her rescue. ‘Perhaps they do, Mother. However, it is a sin to deny such a God-given gift as Miss Siddal’s. Particularly when so much else is denied to her due to her sad delicacy.’

  Her breath stopped. John had spoken aloud her own secret fears. Lizzie had seen her brother dwindle away till he was nothing but a scarecrow. Now she was as gaunt. It was no consolation that the doctors said her lungs were too clear, her skin too cold. Lizzie had seen her brother die. She knew the white disease was eating away at her flesh. She knew she too would waste away to nothing.

  Gabriel ran one finger inside his black neckcloth. ‘If Lizzie would just eat a little more … keep up her strength.’

  John was staring at her with that strange, intent look again. It reminded Lizzie of the look Gabriel got when he went hunting in the flea markets, and found a particularly fine piece of rare china for a bargain price.

  Mrs Ruskin sniffed. ‘I hope that Miss Siddal has not fallen into the disreputable habits of those other rackety artists. I was most distressed to hear that Mr Millais thought nothing of painting on a Sunday!’ She spoke the name of Johnny Millais as one might speak of the Devil.

  ‘Indeed, I have not,’ Lizzie said, in a voice of mild affront. ‘My mother would never permit us to do anything on a Sunday, not even sew our samplers. She was most strict on the subject.’

  ‘A worthy rule,’ Mrs Ruskin said with approval. ‘I wish that more would follow her example. We never permitted our boy to do anything but read the Bible and study his catechism.’ She looked fondly at John, who looked down at his hands, his expression difficult to read. Lizzie wondered if his Sundays had been as long and dreary as hers had been. As if reading her thoughts, John looked up and met her gaze. Lizzie looked away. He did not do the same. She wondered at him, so stiff and formal, yet not knowing enough not to stare a girl out of countenance.

  Gabriel was soon bored, and rose to inspect the paintings. Mr Ruskin joined him, and they were soon deep in a discussion about Turner’s brushwork. Lizzie longed to join them, but she sat and drank her tea, and listened to Mrs Ruskin, who was giving a long lecture on the evils of modern society. To Lizzie’s surprise, John did not join the other men, but stayed and listened to his mother too.

  By the end of their visit, Mrs Ruskin had mellowed sufficiently to promise to send Lizzie a gift of some powdered ivory for her to mix into jam and eat. ‘It will do you the world of good,’ she promised.

  When John said goodbye, he held her hand too long. Again she was discomfited, and yet unwilling to snub him when she knew how important his patronage was.

  In the carriage on the way home, Gabriel was exultant. ‘He adores you, Guggums! Oh, you were perfect.’

  Lizzie smiled, but she felt uncomfortable. She had to remind herself that John Ruskin had bought all her drawings before he had ever met her. He had obviously seen something in them.

  But she could not help wondering if he was so interested in her because she was dying.

  The next day, John Ruskin dropped by the studio. He told Gabriel that he wanted to either buy every drawing or painting that Lizzie produced, or to pay her a regular quarterly allowance. He offered one hundred and fifty pounds a year. It seemed like a fortune.

  Lizzie felt she had to turn it down.

  ‘Don’t be so high in the instep, Gugs,’ Gabriel said. ‘It’s a brilliant offer.’

  ‘But … what does he want in return?’ Lizzie said uneasily. Her father had always said: you don’t get owt for nowt.

  ‘Only to help and support you. He called you a noble, glorious creature,’ Gabriel said. ‘Oh, I knew they would love you!’

>   Lizzie chewed at her lower lip. She did not like it. Not least because Ruskin had spoken to Gabriel about his plans, instead of to her. She had not even been consulted. She remembered that glint of possessiveness in Ruskin’s eyes.

  The next day a letter was delivered, addressed to Miss Siddal. Lizzie cracked open the seal and read it, Gabriel watching her anxiously.

  ‘The world is an odd world,’ John had written. ‘People think nothing of taking my time from me every day of my life (which is to me life, money, power, all in all). They take that, without thanks, for no need, for the most trivial purposes, and would have me lose a whole day to leave a card with their footman; and you, for life’s sake, will not take that for which I have no use. You are too proud. You would not be too proud to let a nurse or friend give up some of her time, if you needed it, to watch by you and take care of you. What is the difference between their giving time and watchfulness, and my giving such help as I can? Perhaps I have said too much of my wish to do this for Rossetti’s sake. But if you do not choose to be helped for his sake, consider also the plain hard fact is that I think you have genius; that I don’t think there is much genius in the world; and I want to keep what there is, in it, heaven having, I suppose, enough for all its purposes. Utterly irrespective of Rossetti’s feelings or my own, I should simply do what I do, if I could, as I should try and save a beautiful tree from being cut down, or a bit of Gothic cathedral whose strength is failing. If you would be so good as to consider yourself as a piece of wood or Gothic for a few months, I should be grateful to you …’

  It was an extraordinary letter. Lizzie read it over and over, always returning to the lines: I think you have genius …

  How could she turn down such a generous and life-changing offer? It was all her dreams come true.

  As soon as she could, Lizzie went to an art supply shop and bought her own paints and brushes and palette; Bruno took her, as Gabriel owed them too much money to show his face there.

  Then Bruno and Gabriel took her to have tea with Mrs Rossetti, and her two long-faced daughters, Maria and Christina. They looked like crows in their black dresses. She tried to pretend that she was the sort of girl that Mrs Rossetti would approve of – demure, devout, docile – yet she felt as though that thin, upright woman saw straight through her and did not like what she found.

  Mrs Rossetti asked no questions about Lizzie’s family and frowned when she coughed into her handkerchief. Her back stiffened as she noticed the many small attentions and affections that Gabriel lavished on Lizzie, and she only stared in cool surprise when Lizzie – who knew she was a pious woman – talked about her own parents’ piety. Lizzie became uneasily aware that perhaps her mother’s idea of God was not the same as Mrs Rossetti’s.

  She retreated into silence, as Gabriel became ever more effusive. The two sisters did not help. Both were stiff and cold and very, very polite.

  Then Gabriel proudly told his mother about John Ruskin’s offer of sponsorship for Lizzie. Instead of being pleased, as he had expected, Mrs Rossetti was affronted. It was clear she thought Lizzie a very-lower-class-kind-of-girl. To be paid to model was bad enough. But to be paid to paint!

  As Gabriel silently walked her home in the swiftly falling dusk, Lizzie imagined the conversation in the austere sitting-room she had just left. I never thought that Gabriel would become entangled with such a common girl … and that hair! The Devil’s colour …

  The days passed, and with it the anniversary of the death of Professor Rossetti. Gabriel began to wear his ox-blood red cravats and flowered waistcoats again. But no word of marriage was uttered.

  And the letters from John Ruskin to Lizzie kept coming.

  ‘I should like you to go to the country immediately. The physician who you consult … may recommend south of France or Italy … if you were my own sister, I should plead hard for a little cottage in some sheltered Welsh valley … try and make yourself as simple a milkmaid as you can … only draw when you can’t help it …’

  Lizzie had no intention of seeing any more doctors. She was far too busy playing with all her new paints and brushes. She thanked John politely but ignored his advice. A few days later, he wrote:

  ‘Forgive me for pressing you to do anything you do not like … I hold it of the very highest importance that you should let Dr. Acland see you … You shall be quite independent. You shall see no-one. You shall have your little room all to yourself. Only once put your tongue out and let him feel your pulse … I am so certain it is the best and happiest thing for you that I have taken upon me … to get your lodgings for you … Please therefore pardon me, and get ready to go to Oxford, for every day lost is of importance. Could you get one of your sisters to go with you on Monday?’

  Once again, Lizzie tried to rebuff him politely, but John Ruskin was not a man to take a hint. He came to visit her and Gabriel at Blackfriars, criticised the way she held her pencil, and told her that she must give up drawing scenes inspired by poetry and stories, and concentrate on drawing in a dull way from dull things.

  Lizzie had been hard at work on a drawing inspired by one of Gabriel’s poems about a young woman who melted a waxen effigy of her faithless lover on the morning of his wedding to another. She could not help being hurt when John told Gabriel that he was allowing Lizzie to wear herself out with fancies. Nonetheless, she listened to his advice and tried to sketch a scene set in the milliner’s shop, the dullest subject she could think of. The result was just as boring as the subject.

  John wrote to her that same day:

  ‘You are a very good girl to say you will break off those disagreeable ghostly connections of yours. I do hope you will be able to go to Oxford on Saturday. I have asked Rossetti to write and tell Dr. Acland if you will. The Doctor will let you see a little sea, if you tell him you like it … I know it is difficult to be cheerful when one is ill. I could sit down to-day and cry very heartily …’

  Lizzie did not know how to withstand him. Unhappily, she agreed to go to Oxford, to see the doctor he recommended. All she wanted was to be left alone to draw and paint and write her poems, while she still could.

  Oxford was as awful as she had expected. Everyone bothered her greatly, and made arrangements on her behalf, and would not let her work. She was expected to make visits and leave cards and go to church and eat in company and enjoy being shown black beetles under microscopes; and Dr Acland was always pressing her to eat more meat and drink more milk, two things that Lizzie particularly hated. The doctor was puzzled by her, she could tell. She was so thin, as if she were wasting away, and yet there was no sign of any consumption in her lungs or bones. In the end he decided that her illness was the result of ‘mental power long pent up and overtaxed’, and told her that she must have a complete rest. No reading, no writing poetry, no drawing, no painting, no late nights, no exertion of any kind.

  It was more than Lizzie could bear. ‘I won’t! Don’t you see? I’d rather die!’

  It only made the doctor even more certain that she was a hysteric.

  John wrote to her again:

  ‘The difficulty is to keep you quiet, and yet to give you means of passing the time with some degree of pleasure to yourself. You inventive people pay very dearly for your powers. There is no knowing how to manage you.’

  Still there was no sign from Gabriel that he intended to make good his promise to marry her. As summer turned into autumn, and plans were made to send Lizzie south for the winter, she began to work secretly on a new poem, writing on any old scrap of paper she could find:

  Slow days have passed that make a year,

  Slow hours that make a day,

  Since I could take my first dear love

  And kiss him the old way …

  9

  Men Will Be Men

  Winter 1855

  Lizzie leaned on the wrought-iron railing of her tiny balcony and gazed out at the sunlit green lawns of the Jardin des Tuileries. She could not believe that she was here, in Paris. It was a dream come true.


  John Ruskin had told her she was to head straight to the south of France, where he expected her to moulder away in some tiny village with nothing to look at but old men in berets and donkeys. Paris will kill you or ruin you, Ruskin had written. Lizzie did not care. She had bought a train ticket to the French capital and booked herself into the most expensive hotel in the city. She had spent her allowance on flounced silk dresses and a cage crinoline, the latest rage at the court of the Empress Eugénie. She had dragged her chaperone, Mrs Kincaid, huffing and puffing through the entire Exposition Universelle, gazing at all the artworks and inspecting the Empress’s extraordinary imperial crown, made with more than two thousand diamonds. She had drunk champagne on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, in the shade of the flowering chestnut trees, and seen the emperor driving out with his beautiful mistress, the Countess di Castiglione.

  Yet the longer she was away, the lonelier Lizzie had become. So she wrote to Gabriel and begged him to come and join her in Paris. He had written back to say Ruskin had forbidden him to come, but Ruskin could be damned. Gabriel was on his way. Lizzie could not wait to see him. She had left him a note with the concierge, with nothing in it but her room number. It made her feel quite scandalous.

  A soft tap on her door. Lizzie hurried to open it, her new crinoline skirt swinging. Gabriel stood on the other side, looking more handsome than ever in a pale flowered waistcoat and his favourite plum-coloured velvet jacket, pockets bulging with pencils and paintbrushes as always.

  He smiled at her and stepped into her arms, kicking the door shut behind him. Lizzie melted into his embrace.